VA WAIT TIMES FOR VETS ARE LONG AND GROWING

Byline

This story was produced by Aaron Glantz and the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting with contributions from U-T staff writer Ashly McGlone and military editor Jim Watters.

California veterans who file with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for a war-related disability claim are waiting more than nine months on average for a decision, according to a review of VA data.

The review by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that San Diego performs better than the state’s other two regional offices in terms of pending claims that have languished longer than the agency goal of 125 days.

In San Diego, the rate of such delayed cases is 66 percent, compared to 94 percent in Oakland and 96 percent in Los Angeles. San Diego claimants are waiting 291 days on average, compared to 363 days in Los Angeles and 346 in Oakland.

The San Diego office declined to comment while awaiting approval from headquarters to speak.

The VA said in a statement that improvements in battlefield medicine mean Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are more likely to survive multiple deployments. As a result, veterans “are returning with triple the medical issues of previous generations, driving the complexity of these claims and their associated workload to an all-time high.”

Nationwide, the delays have become worse despite increased media and political scrutiny. The VA took an average of more than eight months to process a claim in June — about 50 percent longer than the year before.

Santee resident Christine Feaster, 47, counts herself fortunate to receive about $2,900 a month. Feaster said she was honorably discharged from the Army in 1988 for severe depression after serving five years in the transportation support unit for the 82nd Airborne division at Fort Bragg.

“Nine months is nothing,” Feaster said, indicating it is not uncommon for veterans to wait upward of two years. “The VA is under scrutiny for being backlogged, but they are trying their best. They are trying to bring people (staff) in by the droves. With government being what it is, the government only has so much they can try to do because of money problems.”

Some political leaders, including Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, have seized on the issue, holding hearings and demanding results. In response, VA officials have said they are about to turn things around.

“We are already implementing our plan and are getting good early results,” Allison Hickey, the agency’s undersecretary for benefits, told a House oversight subcommittee July 18.

The VA installed a new $300 million computer system and 3,300 claims processors have been hired since 2010 — 765 of them for additional positions. The department has pledged to eliminate the claims backlog by 2015.

VA data shows the number of veterans waiting for a decision is growing — to more than 907,000 as of July 30, with 832,000 of them waiting for disability or survivor benefits, while thousands more seek a pension or GI Bill education benefits.

The computer system has launched at four of the VA’s regional offices, none of them in California. Most claims still are in paper file folders, which must be physically passed from one representative to another.

“If you have ever walked into one of our regional offices, you would see stacks and stacks of paper,” Hickey told reporters July 11.

By 2015, Hickey said, all 58 offices will be computerized. In the meantime, new claims are arriving more quickly than the backlog is being cleared, so without dramatic improvement, disabled veterans will face even longer wait times in the future.

“It’s a slap in the face,” said Adam Fields, a former Marine from Modesto, who has been waiting since November 2010 for a ruling on his claim for benefits for traumatic brain injury.

During his two tours in Iraq, Fields said he survived multiple vehicle rollovers and sustained three concussions.

“Sometimes I get in the car, and I forget where I’m going,” said Fields, who supports his wife and 5-year-old son by driving a scrap metal truck in Stockton. “If the VA approved my claim, I could afford to take time off to get regular treatment.”

In 2011, 1.3 million veterans filed claims for benefits, according to VA data, a combination of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and aging Vietnam veterans, many with new claims based on illnesses the government now acknowledges stem from Agent Orange exposure.

Since 2010, the agency has seen the number of new claims filed annually increase by 48 percent, while the number of claims representatives has increased by 5 percent.

“We’re seeing people break and snap like we’ve never seen before,” said Shad Meshad, a Vietnam veteran and former combat medic who heads up the Los Angeles-based National Veterans Foundation. “When soldiers come home from two, three or four tours with post-traumatic stress disorder and hit these kinds of walls, they can get frustrated and just give up.”

San Diegan Joe Rush, 67, served in the Army as a combat engineer and watercraft operator from 1963 to 1968. He said he received benefits for prostate cancer and diabetes beginning in 2003. His new claim for problems with his knees and ankles was submitted 14 or 15 months ago with no response yet.

“It’s taking forever. I get disability now, but I’ve filed new claims. It looks like you have to either give up or die,” Rush said. “There is room for a lot of improvement.”

Jack Harkins, chairman of the United Veterans Council of San Diego County and a Marine veteran from the Vietnam era, said there’s a reason a new veteran’s claim takes a good deal of time to validate.

“The VA has been told by Congress that it should make sure claims are valid before taxpayer dollars are paid,” he said.

Several highly publicized cases of fraud by veterans exaggerating their symptoms or their military service have made policymakers wary even as they face pressure to serve the vast majority of honest veterans swiftly.

Harkins advocates a system suggested by Rep. Bob Filner, D-San Diego, a member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Claims would be approved quickly and then later audited, much like tax returns are handled by the IRS.

“It may be time for a new paradigm for how to give a decision to the veteran about their claim without so thorough a vetting at the first decision point,” he said. “It’s a shortage of resources. The Department of Veterans Affairs isn’t adequately staffed to handle the volume of claims and get them all answered in the time they want to answer them. That’s disappointing. I realize that it’s not easy to solve. But you can’t just throw dollars at it.”

An inspector general’s report released in May revealed that staff at the VA’s Oakland office failed to process 39 percent of claims correctly. One claim, the report found, languished 8½ years.

In separate reports also released in May, the inspector general found the VA made mistakes on 53 percent of claims in San Diego and 71 percent in Los Angeles.

This story was produced by the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting with contributions from U-T staff writer Ashly McGlone and military editor Jim Watters.